Can someone please show me how links work? As in diff between hard and soft, commands used, and when to use them as opposed to an alias.

thanks.

symlinks or soft links, are used to make either a file appear to be somwhere its not, or have a diffrent name. The command to create them is ln -s. softlinks are basically like shortcuts, and are files that simply point somewhere else.

Hard links are very rarely used, but actually point to a files inode data. All normal files are hardlinks. When you add a hardlink, the files inode structure increments a counter. so the file won't actually be deleted untill both hard links are removed. ln without the -s will create hardlinks.

alias is used primarily for altering the way commands behave by giving them options, or creating variations of commands. i.e

alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias ll='ls -l'

so when you type ls you actually get ls --color-auto, and ll gets ls --color=auto -l.

It shouldn't be used like a link at all.